Nobody needs to convince you that it’s important to test your website’s design and interaction with the people who will use it, right? But if that’s all you do, you’re missing out on feedback about the most important part of your site: the content. ♛ Testing Content by Angela Colter

One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate. The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network.

Beyond Engagement: the Content Performance Quotient The content performance quotient is an index of how quickly you get the right answer to the individual customer, allowing her to act on it or depart and get on with her day. It is a measurement of your value to the customer.

This is where we are. U.S. lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — and top national security officials in the Trump administration offered the same advice publicly and privately, often clashing with Trump’s Twitter stream: The United States remains staunchly committed to its European allies, is furious with the Kremlin about election interference and isn’t contemplating a preemptive strike on North Korea to halt its nuclear program.

For developers who constantly reinvent the wheel (replacing it in most cases with a rectangle), Drew McLellan has an oldie but goodie on why his company’s small CMS uses MySQL instead of a “lightweight” solution.

Saw my friend, creative director Steve McCarron, for lunch today. With Alec Pollak, Steve & I created our first website, Batman Forever, when we worked in advertising in 1995. Need a freelance creative director?

If you’re designing a website or app, how do you know what really matters to your users? Announcing Top Tasks—Helping You Deliver a Better User Experience, by Gerry McGovern. Save $100 if you register before early bird ends!

“It’s not about writing the most sophisticated code or finding the most clever solution to a problem; it’s about users and whether they’re able to use our products.” 11 lessons on incorporating accessibility into your work.

“Conversational design is more than creating interfaces that talk and text. Taking a conversational approach to interaction design requires applying the deeper principles of how humans inter- act with one another so we can create systems that succeed on human terms, no matter the mode of interaction.” Coming 6 March 2018 from @ABookApart: CONVERSATIONAL DESIGN by Erika Hall. @mulegirl Foreword by John Maeda.

What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing you did mattered? Buy this book! YOU’RE MY FAVORITE CLIENT by Mike Monteiro. 2 paperback copies for $25 with discount code YMFCX2. TODAY ONLY—only from @ABookApart.

How to use variable fonts in the real world Richard Rutter: Using variable fonts in the real world turns out to be tricky. This post explains how we achieved it for the new Ampersand website and what we learned along the way. Richard Rutter

SALE. All day, today only, double up on A Book Apart paperbacks & get ’em 2 for $25 with special codes. Like The New CSS Layout by Rachel Andrew – 2 for $25 with code TNCL25. Each book has its own code. Collect them all!

Not your father’s populism. Actually, not populism at all. Labor Dept. tries to bury its own report showing that its new rule allowing bosses to skim waiters’ tips will (surprise, surprise) hurt workers and consumers.

☛ Those who can design, teach. User experience is really a way of defining and planning what we want a user to learn, so we need to think about our design work as how to teach. Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron explains how a designer’s teaching mindset can improve any UX project for the user.

☛ Those who can design, teach. User experience is really a way of defining and planning what we want a user to learn, so we need to think about our design work as how to teach. Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron explains how a designer’s teaching mindset can improve any UX project for the user.

Details, details. “Now, when you make a to-do in Basecamp, you’ll see a new field labeled When done, notify. Add people you want to notify when the to-do is completed and Basecamp will be sure to tell them about it.” Thoughtful new Basecamp 3 feature.

Recreating the GitHub Contribution Graph with CSS Grid Layout “As I always find while working with CSS Grid Layout, I end up with far less CSS than I would have using almost any other method. In this case, the layout-related part of my CSS ended up being less than 30 lines, with only 15 declarations!”

From pixels to prose, coding to content: celebrate 20 years of brilliant articles “for people who make websites.” A List Apart—which began as a mailing list in 1997 and became a website in 1998—is now 20 years old! ALA explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. Join the few, the proud, the user-focused and front-end-savvy. Whether you’re a designer, coder, writer, or strategist, new to the field or a one-time webmaster, A List Apart is your community. Wear it proudly. The last possible second to buy this design is Feb 12, 2018 at 8:00 PM EST.

I Don't Know If You Heard, But Over 1 Million People Participated in Women's Marches This Weekend ”If Trump fans, who represent a sliver of the electorate so small that Trump remains the most unpopular president since Harry Truman, are given the full run of the New York Times editorial section because we need to better understand them, then surely the greatest mass mobilization of women nationwide (ever?) deserves at least an equivalent measure of attention.“

✩ My old friend & former design colleague, ProPublica’s brilliant Rob Weychert, has created Column Setter, an open source tool for building custom responsive grids that work in older browsers. If you *can’t* use #CSSGrid, use this. Hat tip: David Sleight.

When it comes to mental health, we aren’t as understanding as we think we are. ALA reached out to folks in our industry who were willing to share what mental health in the workplace looks like for them. Whether you have your own struggles or just want to understand, their stories are a great place to start the conversation. Mental Illness in the Web Industry by Brandon Gregory.

I am sorry to see The Awl closing shop. They were a fine web magazine. So many fine, brave, independent websites have arisen over the years, calling our attention to new ideas and new voices, enriching the web and our lives. So few have survived. Thank you for your service.

“A key feature of Flexbox and Grid Layout is that they can deal with distributing available space between, around and inside grid and flex items. Quite often this just works, and we get the result we were hoping for without trying very hard. ... Sometimes, however, you might wonder why something ends up the size that it is. Or, you might want to do something different to the default behavior. To do so, you need to know something of how the underlying algorithms figure out how to distribute space.”

Everything you need to know about hiring researchers as contractors. Authors Chelsey Glasson, Jeff Sauro, and Cory Lebson have run a user research agency, hired external researchers, and worked as freelancers. Via their different perspectives, they provide a solid guide. Part I of two articles.

“2017 ended up being a big year for aXe and accessibility testing. Not long after the Lighthouse announcement, Lighthouse and aXe-core were rolled out to Chrome Devtools, putting accessibility testing tools into the hands of of over 20 million Devtools users.”

“For Mrs. Clinton, it’s the latest—and perhaps last—cruel twist in a public life full of them. Her loss to Mr. Trump helped ignite the kind of movement she’d once been poised to lead but that she now mostly watches from the sidelines.”

“To the extent that women’s bodies are still treated as public property by men, whether that means groping us or deciding what we can do with our uteruses, women do not have civic equality. To miss that point is to miss the political importance and the political lineage of #MeToo: the latest step in a centuries long political struggle for women to simply control our own bodies.”

To grow sustainably, startups need to create structure for their people - or bad things happen. If you're in NYC January 18, attend the free panel, "Scaling 101: How To Grow Your Team Without Losing Your Culture," hosted by General Assembly & For the Win.

“Inspired by a style of lettering invented to convey precision and reliability, Isotope is a new family of typefaces designed to be both luxurious and fit.” Full range of weights, advanced Open Type features, Latin-X™ character set covering over 140 languages. New from Hoefler & Co.

“The street was filled with cars that had been pulled over, and drivers who had exited their vehicles and were standing around in the cold, awaiting punishment of some kind.” ✩ Fresh: PULLED OVER (MY GLAMOROUS LIFE). 2 min read.

“Wolff has spent this week thoroughly exploiting Trump and his minions the same way they've exploited the cluelessness of others. And he pulled it off because, at long last, there was a reporter out there willing to toss decorum aside and burn bridges the same way Trump does.”